by Julia James
She fought it back—fought it down. Recovered herself in the way she always had. By refusing to let anyone put her down. Refusing to acknowledge the hit.
Her imperviousness seemed only to rile him more.
‘All that classy gloss, Kat,’ he said softly, a taunt in his eyes, ‘and it’s all just fake. A cultivated act. A veneer. You’d never have carried it off—you’d have given yourself away, reverted to type.’
His eyes were resting on her, speculative, assessing. And suddenly, through the tightness in her throat, Thea could see what he was doing. He wanted to see her do just that—’revert to type’. And in that instant she knew exactly how she would retaliate from now on.
By not retaliating. By being Thea, not Kat—never Kat. She felt a surge of venomous satisfaction go through her.
‘Nothing to say, Kat?’
She made no answer. Just tightened her lips and stared back at him. His eyes held hers—dark, penetrating. They narrowed very slightly even as he held her gaze.
‘You defy me, don’t you, Kat?’ It was said almost contemplatively, almost curiously, as if she were a species of insect that was behaving anomalously. He took another leisurely mouthful of wine. ‘But then,’ he continued in that same tone of voice, ‘you always did, didn’t you? Right from that very first encounter, when you pushed past me at the entrance to this very hotel …’ He set the glass back down on the linen tablecloth. ‘Tell me, is it stupidity that makes you like this?’
Thea’s fingers curled around her water glass. One tightening more and it would surely break. She resisted. She tilted her chin slightly, feeling the pearl drop earrings move slightly—pearls she had bought with her own money, her own efforts, her own relentless determination and hard work to achieve what she had. Climbing up from the nothing she had been born with into the sunlit lands above.
‘No,’ she answered, her voice deliberately careless. ‘It’s indifference, that’s all. Complete indifference.’
The expression on his face changed. Something flashed in his eyes, then it was gone. She had seen what it was, though—anger. Oh, yes, the almighty Angelos Petrakos, with all his power, didn’t like being told that!
He spoke again, his deep voice almost a drawl. A drawl that seemed to drag across her skin. ‘Indifference? Oh, no, Kat. It’s not indifference you feel towards me. It’s anger because you can’t manipulate me.’
Her eyes flashed, and Angelos felt a stab of satisfaction. He wanted her angry, lashing out at him. Breaking the surface of the smooth, flawless veneer she had plastered over her true nature.
Because that was what it was—he would allow it to be nothing else. Nothing more …
Angelos! Darling! I had no idea you were in London!’
The scent of heavy perfume wafted across the table and Thea turned her head to see someone approaching that she recognised. Not that she knew her personally, but because the woman bearing down upon them was a well-known TV actress who specialised in the femme fatale roles for which her dramatic looks were well suited. Thea watched Angelos acknowledge the woman’s greeting, but though his expression was impassive she could see irritation in the back of his eyes.
‘Candice,’ he said briefly.
The actress’s eyes rested on his face avidly for a moment, then gave the briefest glance in Thea’s direction. For an instant they were blank—then there was a flash of malice.
‘Don’t you usually run around with Giles Brooke? Be careful, my dear, or you may find the Viscountess’s coronet slipping through your fingers!’
‘It was never mine to let slip.’ Thea gave a courteous smile, ignoring the jibe.
Arched eyebrows rose. ‘No? It looked like you had him wrapped around your finger?’
‘I wouldn’t really have fitted the bill as his wife, Miss Paule.’ Thea’s voice was subdued.
The actress breathed out, the malice in her eyes even more pronounced. ‘So he didn’t propose after all? Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry!’ Her insincerity was masterly. Her voice became conspiratorial. ‘No wonder you’ve decided to settle for more transient pleasures. Enjoy them—on Angelos’s established record they will be so very transient! Now, Angelos darling—’ her tone was now cajoling ‘—I must introduce you to someone I’m here with. He’s got the most fascinating project planned. He wants me to play the lead as soon as the finance is sorted. It’s going to be a sure-fire hit, and if you came in on it you’d absolutely clean up—’
‘TV and film isn’t my investment area, Candice,’ said Angelos bluntly, cutting across her.
For a moment the actress’s expression faltered. ‘Oh, but surely since it’s me who’s involved you’d make an exception—’
‘Candice, I made it crystal clear during our time together that our relationship was personal, not professional. I don’t mix the two. Ever.’
The over-made-up eyes flashed. ‘Better make sure Little Miss Jilted knows that! She’ll be assuming she’s a dead cert for your next advertising campaign just because she’s warming your bed!’ she snapped, and flounced off back to her party.
Thea watched her go. Then she became aware that Angelos was watching her.
‘That’s a lesson you’ve already learned,’ he said softly. Then, abruptly, his expression changed. ‘Why didn’t you set Candice right about the assumption she made that Brooke never proposed to you? She’ll spill it to the first gossip columnist she sees.’
‘I know,’ said Thea. ‘That’s why I told her.’
Angelos’s brows drew together. ‘What are you plotting?’ he demanded.
Thea looked straight at him. ‘I’ve hurt Giles—you gave me no option but to do so—but I don’t want to humiliate him. I’d rather it looked like he didn’t want to marry me than that I ditched him for you.’
Her mouth twisted, and he felt a stab of something more than anger.
The arrival of their food distracted him, but as they started to eat he found himself watching her. She was filleting the fish, focussing on her task. Blanking him out.
He made himself recall how she had looked that first evening he had brought her here. How gauche she had been, how out of her depth. The woman sitting opposite him now was a million miles from the one she had been those years ago.
She’s still Kat Jones—thief, liar, and ready to offer her body for what she wants …
His mouth tightened. That was all he must remember.
By the time the meal was finally over and they were heading for the elevators Thea’s nerves were at breaking point. There were others in the lift when they stepped in, and Thea was grateful. Being alone with Angelos Petrakos, even for the briefest time, was hideous. Sitting at the same table as him—being so physically close to his lean, powerful body, sheathed in its charcoal bespoke suit, seeing that strong-featured face with its short-clipped raven hair, the dark, glinting eyes and the sensual, brutal mouth—had overwhelmed her. Even in the dining room she had felt dangerously isolated with him, despite the presence of other diners.
The elevator doors sliced opened to let some people out and others in. Too many. They hustled her backwards and suddenly, without realising what was about to happen, she felt herself crushed back against Angelos. Shock at his sudden closeness immobilised her. It raked through her as she felt instantly, consummately, the hardness of his chest, the muscle of his thigh.
Behind her, Angelos felt the contours of her body mould against him, slender and rounded. Immediately his hands lifted to her shoulders, steadying her. She tensed instantly. His palms were burning as he felt her straining away from him, pulling against his hands. Automatically, instinctively, his hold tightened, countering her attempt to free herself.
The lift stopped again and she wrenched free, pushing her way out, stalking rapidly to the door of his suite, body rigid. Her spine was like a ramrod. The contact had lasted only moments, but it had ignited her overwrought nerves, exploded the iron control she had held down all evening.
Inside, she rounded on him. Her face was contorted
, venom spitting from her eyes. ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t ever touch me!’
Into her head sliced the forbidden memory—the one she never let out! The one that for five long years she had never, ever let herself remember. But here in this place, this very spot where it had happened, here where she was standing, now it flooded through her.
I stood here—here! And he came up to me and … and …
Hot, humid memory drenched her. The glide of his fingertips touching her, the deep, deep drowning of his mouth as it moved on hers, sensual, possessing …
A shudder went through her—through every bone in her body, every cell. ‘I couldn’t bear it!’ she said. She took a ragged, broken breath. ‘This is a two-bedroom suite—I checked!’ She dived on her small holdall, snatching it up. Then—not looking at him again, not looking anywhere near him—she flung open the nearest door leading off the suite’s lounge.
It wasn’t his room. Unoccupied, empty. She plunged inside and slammed shut the door, leaning against it while the breath shook in her body.
Outside, Angelos stood immobile. Emotion was raging through his head. Emotion that he’d kept out by strength of will, by masking it with anger. Anger that he’d deliberately, determinedly fuelled since the moment he’d first set eyes on her again at that restaurant with the man she’d been inveigling to marry, slicing back through the years—anger that he’d used deliberately, determinedly, to allow him to do what he had done in summoning her here. Giving him a reason to force her back into his life—a reason to sever her from the man she’d wanted to marry. He’d been telling himself that he was doing so only because he was enraged by her attempt to lie about her past, to fool an innocent, hapless man about what she truly was.
But he’d been deceiving himself.
Anger was not the only driving force behind his determination to stop Kat Jones in her tracks. He’d been denying that truth all through dinner as he’d watched her across the table from him, seeing her graceful, elegant beauty drawing eyes as it always had—and his, too, he knew. Despite everything he felt about her he could not deny that—could not deny that his eyes wanted to rest on her, take in that extraordinary, luminous beauty of hers …
Then, in the lift, his hands closing over her shoulders, his palms feeling the warmth of her body, catching the scent of her, her body so close to his, it had blazed in him. He had known then, irrefutably, what her power was … what it had always been …
A power she herself was trying to deny.
In his head shrilled her voice, loathing and fear in it— ’Don’t touch me! Don’t ever touch me! I couldn’t bear it!’
His face twisted, new emotion working in him.
She hates you for what you did to her. It dominates her response to you, obliterating everything else.
Slowly, he walked into his bedroom, his mind still full. He had done what he had to her five long years ago because there had been no other way to impose justice upon her—because she had outwitted the law with her lies and slander. He felt no remorse for what he had done—why should he? She had stolen from him, slandered him—and got away with it in the eyes of the law.
But she had not got away with it in his eyes—he knew the truth of what she had done—and so he had exacted his own justice upon her. Just as, now, he’d refused to allow her to continue to deceive her hapless fiancé about her past.
But she’s paid the price for both …
Did he need to feel only anger towards her any more? Or was he now free to indulge that other, equally powerful emotion he felt about her? The one that was even more powerful now, five years on, in the face of her new, mature, cultured beauty.
He didn’t know. Not clearly yet. Knew only, as his hand went with automatic gestures to loosen his tie as he proceeded to head for his solitary bed, in the acute consciousness of her presence so short a distance away, that he wanted to find out—and that to do so would require continuing to keep her with him.
But not here. His thoughts resolved themselves, gelling to a point of decision that focused within him with sudden clarity. He did not want to be here with her, in this suite, with the memory of how she had behaved five years ago all around him, dragging him back into the past. No—if he was to allow himself to feel any emotion for her other than anger, as that revelatory moment in the elevator had forced him to admit he did, then he must take her somewhere he could discover the truth of her character, whatever she called herself now.
And he knew exactly the place.
Decision made, he started to ready himself for bed. From tomorrow he would start to discover the truth he was seeking. And whether he could have what he wanted.
CHAPTER SIX
Someone was knocking softly. Thea heard the sound of a door opening, then a female voice spoke.
‘Madam, breakfast is served.’
Blearily, Thea raised her head from the pillow. She had scarcely slept—not until dawn had been fingering across the city sky. Her head had been filled with memories—memories she had fought for five years.
I let him—I let him kiss me. I did not fight, I did not yell, or pull away, or hit at him, or anything—anything at all. I just stood there and let him do that to me …
But now, at last, the day had come—her release. She was free, she thought blankly, to go home, take up her empty life again.
Swiftly, she made a basic toilette, desperate to be gone. But as she walked out of her bedroom her eyes immediately fell on him, fully dressed in a business suit, seated at the breakfast table. There was no sign of the maid who had roused her. His head turned as she came into the room. For a moment their eyes met, then she blanked hers and said, her tone brisk, ‘I’m going now.’
His expression did not change. ‘You’re going nowhere. Come here, Kat, and sit down. I may not keep my mistresses long, but I keep them longer than one night. You’re coming with me to Geneva—we leave at noon.’
Her dismay was open. ‘I can’t just leave London. I have appointments.’ It was all she could think to say through the tide of rejection sweeping through her at his words.
‘Cancel them,’ he said indifferently. ‘Your agency can phone my office if there are any problems. I’ll compensate for any contractual objections arising from your absence.’
She stood, fulminating with fury—and something more than fury that was not fear, never fear, but still made her want to rush from the room. But if she did his threat to expose her to Giles would hang over her head still …
She set her face. She could not let Angelos see either her fury or her dismay. ‘You said noon, I believe?’ she said carelessly.
He nodded.
‘Very well.’ She didn’t bother to ask what she should pack. Didn’t bother to do anything except head for the door and leave.
At the table, Angelos watched her go. Was he deranged? Deranged to do this? Yet one glimpse of her standing there, bristling and defiant, her face bare of make-up yet still startlingly beautiful, had told him that his decision was the right one. Definitely the right one. Whatever he wasn’t sure about, one thing was for sure—he was not about to let Kat Jones go.
The executive jet skimmed the cloud surface. Sunlight poured in through Thea’s porthole. How could the world be so bright when inside her head was only darkness? Across the aisle Angelos sat, ensconced in paperwork. Her mask of studied indifference had hardly been needed. He had ignored her presence throughout the journey to the airfield and so far throughout the flight. His attention had been reserved only for his work—and the smiling stewardess who had fawned over him. Thea would have laughed at her efforts had she not had a stone in her chest. She stared, unseeing, down at her book, taking in nothing.
How was she to get through what was to come?
And what was to come? The stone in her chest hardened.
If he tries it—if he lays a finger on me …
Panic choked her throat, and she fought it down, regaining control of herself. Keeping that control rigidly for the remainder of the flight, a
nd then for the business of deplaning and travelling into the centre of Geneva. She was considerably better travelled now than she had been when she’d been Kat, but Geneva was new to her, and she gazed about her as a car drove them along the edge of Lac Lemain, past the famous iconic fountain jetting out of the water, and turned into the older part of town. The hotel was discreetly expensive, and Kat felt panic bite again as they were shown into Angelos’s suite. It subsided again as the bellboy took her bag into a separate bedroom. Surely if Angelos intended to try and get her into bed he would not have allowed her a bedroom of her own?
But if that was not his intent—then what was? The question ran round the inside of her skull, finding no answer, only tormenting her.
Her tension still sky-high, she heard Angelos’s voice from the doorway.
‘I have engagements this afternoon. Do whatever you want, but be ready to go to dinner at eight.’
She looked at him stiffly, stifling her anxieties, making herself think only of trivial, practical things. ‘What dress code?’
‘Cocktail,’ he said briefly. ‘And, Kat, this is Switzerland. They’re a sober people. Dress accordingly.’
The outfit she’d chosen, out of the variety she had brought with her must have been what he had in mind, for he made no comment on the knee-length olive-green dress. Her nerves were stretched like wire. She had spent the afternoon desultorily watching television and reading, and somehow she would get through the evening. She was relieved to find they were not à deux, as she had dreaded, but instead at a dinner function held in a private dining room at an expensive restaurant. She had gone into the kind of automatic social chitchat she was used to with Giles, and had it not been for Angelos Petrakos’s brooding presence would have found the experience perfectly pleasant.
She did her best to ignore Angelos, but his was not an easy presence to ignore. She was conscious all the time of his deep voice, his harsh, handsome features, and the dominating impact he made at the table, drawing the eyes, she knew, of all the other women present. At one point towards the end of the evening, to her shock, she heard him laugh—a sound she had never heard before. Her head whipped round, and she could only blink as she saw how the planes of his face had altered completely, with deep lines indenting around his mouth. She felt a jolt go through her, and for one fatal moment his line of sight intercepted hers. The jolt came again, like an electric shock, then, draggingly, she tore her eyes away.